1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to managing and storing data, for example for backup purposes.
2. Background Information
The amount and type of data that is collected, analyzed and stored is increasing rapidly over time. The compute infrastructure used to handle this data is also becoming more complex, with more processing power and more portability. As a result, data management and storage is increasingly important. One aspect of this is reliable data backup and storage, and fast data recovery in cases of failure.
At the same time, virtualization allows virtual machines to be created and decoupled from the underlying physical hardware. For example, a hypervisor running on a physical host machine or server may be used to create one or more virtual machines that may each run the same or different operating systems, applications and corresponding data. In these cases, management of the compute infrastructure typically also includes backup and retrieval of the virtual machines, in addition to just the application data.
As the amount of data to be backed up and recovered increases, there is a need for better approaches to transfer only the data needed to make a backup.